Other editions of book The Catcher in the Rye

Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories--particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor--will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

The adage says that there are two sides to every story, but as most contemporary literature teachers can attest, there are many sides to every story-or at least many ways of looking at a story. Prestwick House's Multiple Perspectives Lesson Guides provide the high school teacher with everything she needs to guide her students through the study of the titles she teaches from a variety of critical viewpoints. Every Multiple Perspectives Lesson Guide provides a general introduction to the work (plot summary, introductions to key characters, brief discussions of social and historical background); clear and concise explanations of three critical theories (including feminism, Marxism, Freudianism, new historicism, and formalism); and reading, writing, and discussion activities designed to help students probe the familiar text in new and deeper ways. Teachers who want to take their teaching of literature beyond the tired plot pyramid and want their students to experience the books they love more than reader-response alone will let them, will find Prestwick House Multiple Perspectives Lessons Guides to be an invigorating addition to their course syllabus.

J.D. Salinger's Classic novel of tennage angst & rebellion that was first published in 1951 & became popular with adolescent readers over the years. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, though it has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality. In the 1950s & 60s it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.